Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins. On the surface, it looks as clean and shiny as every other Google service, which makes its rotting interior all the more jarring — like visiting Disneyland and finding broken windows and graffiti on Main Street USA.
I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.
— Google’s visual design lead, Doug Bowman, is leaving the company after three years in the role. It’s difficult to comprehend that Google existed for its first seven years without a classically-trained designer on its payroll. I like Buzz Andersen’s take, that without a design-led focus, Google products will generally “fall short of achieving the emotional connection that people feel to an iPhone”. I use and enjoy many Google products, but I’ve never loved their aesthetic, no matter what the numbers say.
Google Blog Search went from being incredibly useful to utterly useless for me.
— John Gruber on the changes to Google Blog Search that result in all links (including sidebar and footer links) being returned as new blog content. Same result here, the service is pretty much useless, especially for our work-related searches.
